Oil and Industry in Norway and Brazil

When oil fields of some size were discovered in Brazil, they lay in the ocean off the country’s long Atlantic coast. For this reason, when drilling and production accelerated, it tended to be compared with other offshore oil-producing regions, like the North Sea and the US Gulf of Mexico, rather than with other Latin American countries. This chapter compares the development of oil in Norway and Brazil. It asks how both countries tried to develop local competence, not only by establishing state oil companies, but particularly by trying to develop a local offshore supply industry. Although Brazil and Norway are very different countries, this comparison is of great interest since the two countries started drilling for oil offshore at the same time in the 1960s, found oil at the same time and had many of the same aspirations. However, the existence of different outcomes was demonstrated when Brazils early effort to create a local offshore oil-related industry almost collapsed in the mid-1990s, while Norwegian suppliers actually won a substantial part of the Brazilian market in the following 2000s oil boom. The different outcomes became once more visible when renewed efforts to get a strong Brazilian hold in the industry collapsed after the 2014 fall in oil prices, in what became one of the most traumatic economic and political crises in Brazil’s history.